Topic: impact of Arab texts on European societyPosted By: rami
Subject: impact of Arab texts on European society
Date Posted: 16 September 2005 at 6:52pm

Bi ismillahir rahmanir raheem

assalamu alaikum

Tracing the impact of Latin translations of Arabic texts on European society

Imagine
a period in history, a time when Arab and Islamic cultures were at
their zenith, renowned for their learning and scholarship. Aspiring
scholars from the world over, flocked to these centres to get the best
education money could buy. Some of these centres were privately run
Madrasas, attached to mosques, with a wide ranging curriculum that
focused on both religious and secular higher education. You did not
have to be a Muslim to attend a course of learning at these Madrassas.
By contrast enrolling at a university in medieval Europe was the first
step to taking holy orders and to priesthood. Thus not only were
European institutions of higher learning not open to Jews and Muslims
but they were also closed to Christian scholars who wanted to fulfill
their educational aspirations without having to take up holy orders.
Hence Christian and Jewish scholars who were in a position to, also
sought out these Madrassas and were not averse to the opportunity of
being instructed by the leading scholars of the Muslim world of that
time, not only in secular courses but also in Bible and Torah studies.
In other words these Madrassas were all round institutions of adult
learning that had an international reputation and appeal that crossed
religious and political divides.

The 8th to the 13th centuries
was such a period in Islamic history, when scholars from the Arab and
the wider Islamic world explored the learning of earlier civilizations
and built out of them a world civilization based on science which was
previously unmatched. Arab and Arabic is key here. For just as today,
English is the lingua franca of the modern age, the language in which
flagship achievements, especially of science and technology are
expressed. So Arabic was the international language of communication of
the medieval age, certainly in regard to science and technology.
Medieval European scholars who wanted to share in this learning needed
to master Arabic as a first step.

Today the tables have turned
and it is scholars from Islamic lands – those who can, who flock West
to immerse themselves not only in the best modern education money can
buy, but also to rediscover the golden age of Islamic learning. It is
now the Western scholars who have taken on the role of preserving and
unlocking the old Arabic texts that hold the details of what Muslims
conveyed to the Europe of the middle ages. When the Islamic world wakes
up from its current fit of collective slumber and despair, Muslim
scholars will hark back to appreciate the work of a coterie of Western
scholars who have kept alive the study of the Islamic contribution to
sciences and culture and who are bringing to light the common past of
the European Islamic current that binds two great civilizations
together and which gave rise to that period in the emergence of
European civilisation..

Charles Burnett is amongst this band of
scholars who are helping to redress the issue of the missing link that
laid the foundations European civilization and through their
scholarship are challenging the prevalent and received view that
Europe's escape from its dark ages was uniquely and exclusively a
European affair divorced not only from its own past but also from any
influences of the non-European world. His lifelong focus has been to
trace the transfer of knowledge from the Islamic world to the Europe of
the middle ages, initially through the conduit of the Latin cultures of
Europe – the cultures closest in proximity to Arab and Middle Eastern
civilizations. But as he stresses, "there's so much still to do simply
in documenting the sheer number of texts written in Arabic that were
translated into Latin". His ongoing research also focuses on
"documenting the impact these texts had on Western scholars" of the
time, as well as on the non-textual influences "of architecture, of
music, of visual arts and technology".

Such a major undertaking straddles many disciplines and happily he is able to cast his net wide because as he put it:

"I
am not a specialist, I am not a historian of mathematics, I am not a
historian of astronomy and neither am I a political historian. If I
have a role it is that I'm in a position to bring together these
various strands because as professor of History of Arabic and Islamic
influences in the West in the Middle Ages I can take a wider view and
look at the whole picture and the various different aspects of Arabic
and Islamic influence that came to the West. The field is very wide".

The
field is wide indeed, as revealed by a cursory glance through his
comprehensive list of publications, making it clear that the Arab and
Islamic influences on the Europe of the middle ages was not just about
the history of mathematics and astronomy, important as these were in
themselves, but encompassed wide ranging influences that had far
reaching consequences in catalyzing the seismic shift that catapulted
Europe into the modern age. In focusing on the Arabic and Islamic roots
of the revival of sciences in Europe, Burnett's work is influential in
persuading historians to re-evaluate the renaissance. Some scholars are
even now disputing the validity of the term and the historical period
it covered. It is being suggested that, renaissance, a French word, was
not the term the Europeans of the time used to describe the changes
that were afoot in their society, when Europe was emerging from it's
long sleep of the so called "dark ages". For instance in Italy the
period that is now named the renaissance was known as 'rinascita'
meaning rebirth. By this was meant the rebirth of classical culture and
the rediscovery of the knowledge of antiquity. The term renaissance was
in fact used for the first time in the 19th century, by which time
attitudes had hardened. Europeans had replaced Muslims as the colonial
force to be reckoned with, and were not only making exponential
advances in science and technology but were using this knowledge to
remake the world and now saw themselves in an evangelical light as
belonging to a superior civilization that was 'bequeathing' the gift of
science to the rest of the world. It has been suggested that this is
when the centuries covering the renaissance came to be regarded as
uniquely a European phenomena that did not rely on any input of other
civilizations and that if Arab and Islamic cultures contributed in any
way they did so only as agents and made no original contribution to the
flowering of science and technology in the West.

Although being
mere agents was in itself would have been no mean achievement for as
Burnett points out "it's very important even to be a conveyor, to
understand scientific knowledge and culture and pass it on". To
institutionalise a top down policy of mining all seams of existing
knowledge systematically, add to it and refine it was indeed a marathon
undertaking but "they did so much more and this is being increasingly
recognised in recent scholarship". The notion that Arabs were agents
only does not stand close scrutiny and has arisen, he says because of
the lamentable tendency of many Western scholars to restrict the study
of Arabic science and philosophy from the classical period to the 12th
century and "not take any notice of what happened in the Islamic world
after the 12th century, which is after the death of Avarroes in 1198".
Avarroes or Abul-Waleed Muhammad Ibn Rushd, from Cordoba in Spain was
regarded by Medieval Europe as the greatest scholar of the Muslim
world. As a prominent doctor of medicine, a philosopher and as someone
who did service as a judge in Cordoba and in Morocco, Ibn Rushd
certainly embraced a unique amalgam of science, philosophy, religion
and jurisprudence. But the reverence for this undoubtedly great
scientist and thinker had a downside in that it imposed a self-limiting
approach based on the assumption that scholarship in the Islamic world
climaxed during his life time and came to an end with his death. As a
consequence "Arabic authorities were simply not considered important"
as reference points after the 12th century. The idea that the Islamic
world came to a standstill after the death of it's most famous
scientist and philosopher is "certainly not true" says Burnett and "it
is now being realized that scholarship continued in the Islamic world
and "some of the greatest Islamic scholars came after this period". Why
then that whilst history records the achievements of great scientists
such as Galileo, Newton and Copernicus, Muslim scientists are
conspicuous by their absence and even when they get a mention who knows
what they were known for. Burnett counters that Scientists like Nasir
ad-Din al-Tusi who came after the death of Avarroes were "very great
scientists by any reckoning" and that in any case today "most people
would find it difficult to say what Galileo was known for" even if
there is a lingering perception that he was a great scientist.

Burnett
began his academic life not as a scholar of Arabic as one might imagine
but as a scholar of Latin and Greek and credits his 6th form teacher at
Manchester Grammar School, with being the one to trigger his interest
in the close relationship between Latin, Greek and Arabic scholarship
that existed in medieval times. He recalls the words of his teacher who
told him that: The European renaissance was caused by the flowing
together of two great rivers of knowledge. One came directly from the
Greek through Greek exiles from Constantinople and a second river
meandered from ancient Greek /Latin civilizations through the Islamic
world, through translations from Greek into Arabic and then washed back
into Europe. It was the merging of these two rivers that caused the
renaissance and the rise of the modern era and of modern science in
Europe.

More inspiration to investigate the confluence and
merging of these two rivers came when he went to St John's College,
Cambridge to read Latin and to ponder on the topic of his doctorate
research. His tutor in Medieval Latin, the eminent Peter Dronke, gave
him a book called 'Studies in the History of Medieval Science' by
Charles Haskins, an American historian. Haskins too lent great weight
to the importance of Arabic sources for medieval science and his book
inspired Burnett to select a text on cosmology by one Hermann of
Carinthia, as his research topic. The text – On the Essences, focused
on the universe, "embracing celestial and terrestrial physics and on
the nature of man, the 'little cosmos'" and used both Arabic and Latin
sources. Hermann of Carinthia was a 12th century scholar, originally
from what is present day Croatia. He studied in Chatres and is known
for having translated many Arabic manuscripts into Latin in Spain and
Southern France. In fact as Burnett subsequently discovered all of
Hermann's other works were direct translations from Arabic. The links
between medieval Latin and Arabic were becoming obvious and it became
an imperative to learn Arabic in order to get more of a handle on his
chosen area of research. "I began to do this in an informal way by
reading Arabic texts with people in Cambridge" he says "and as soon as
I started learning Arabic I realized I knew some Arabic already".
Learning Arabic rekindled memories of his childhood in East Africa
where his father had taught at a mission school and where he had grown
up speaking Swahili, an East African language derived in part from
Arabic. Being reconnected to his past brought to the surface the Arabic
words he had known and spoken as a child. So began his commitment to
what he refers to as "the work of a lifetime" and he says "my study of
Arabic was not only academically relevant and interesting but it also
had a personal resonance and I discovered that really there was so much
to do".

Initially and partly through reading the secondary
sources that were then available Burnett was under the impression that
Toledo in Spain was the main point of contact between Arab, Christian
and Jewish scholars and the place where most of the translations of
Arabic manuscripts into Latin were done in the 12th and 13th centuries.
But on closer scrutiny he discovered important centres in Sicily,
southern Italy and significantly in the Middle East and he says,
evidence suggests that translations of Arabic works of sciences began
as early as the late10th century. He points to the fact that after the
Crusaders arrived in the Middle East and after "they had done their
bloody work", many settled in the Middle East. Amongst the settlers
were scholars who were genuinely curious about Arab civilization and
developed close and friendly contacts with Arab scholars. Consequently
several important Arabic works on medicine and philosophy were
translated and made available to Europe for the first time in the late
11th century and early 12th century. By the 13th century this friendly
engagement had developed into what Burnett refers to as a "commonwealth
of scholars for whom political and religious barriers evaporated". A
typical member of this community of scholars would have been someone
like Theodore of Antioch, a Syriac speaking Christian. He elected to go
to what was then the leading place of scholarship in Mosul to study
philosophy under a renowned Muslim scholar, the mathematician and
theologian, Kamal al-Din Ibn Yunus. On completing his course he went to
Baghdad to study medicine. He then began to search for a position
commensurate with his top notch academic credentials and was initially
offered and served a posting at the court of the Muslim Seljuk Turks
who had established a dynasty in Anatolia. Here was a Christian scholar
who had secured his education by seeking out the very best Muslim
academic institutions of the time and was now employed at the court of
a Muslim monarch – proof if needed that what mattered was what he knew
and not his religious affiliation. From the Seljuk court he moved to
the Armenian Christian court where he served Constantine of Lampron,
who was the regent for the boy king Hayton I. By now his education and
professional experience at both Muslim and Christian courts had
conferred on him an international reputation and he was head hunted by
Frederick the 2nd of Sicily and became his court philosopher. In his
time, as Burnett emphasizes, Theodore of Antioch was a good example of
an international scholar who sought out and got the best education he
could in Islamic institutions and then served the rulers who offered
him the best compensation package in the way of renumeration and
conditions not to mention professional prestige. And Kamal al-Din Ibn
Yunus under whom Theodore of Antioch studied, was a polymath who
offered courses not only in Islamic theology and sciences but also in
the Christian Gospels and the Torah and it is reported that Christian
and Jewish scholars sought him out in order to study their faith under
him.

If the range of subjects in Burnett's prodigious list of
publications, covering the Latin translations of Arabic texts is
anything to go by then it seems that the early European translators
were hungry for any area of learning from the mundane to the erudite,
from a whole gamut of practical skills to "the most sophisticated and
academically profound explanations of the philosophy of Aristotle by
Avarroes, Ibn Sinna and al-Farabi". The Latin translators, says
Burnett, "knew" that what "they wanted and needed,…. and they knew they
could find them, in countries where Islamic civilization had been
strong – in Spain, Sicily and South Italy where Arabs had been for a
couple of centuries and in the Middle East". Schools of translations
were set up in these centres. Some translators were Christian scholars
who had traveled and some such as Theodore of Antioch were educated in
Muslim institutions. But many did not have familiarity with Arabic
speaking cultures and were assisted by Muslim and Jewish scholars. In
Toledo Jewish interpreters, who had lived in Muslim societies and knew
Arabic and were themselves familiar with the major Islamic works on
medicine, astronomy and philosophy and played a vital role in
translating Arabic works into Latin. This was particularly the case
after 1140 when Jews were expelled from Toledo by the Almohads, who
reconquered that part of Spain. Additionally certain Christian kings
such as Sicily's Frederick the 2nd was exceptionally sympathetic to
Muslims and welcomed Muslim scholars to his court. Siraj al-Din Urmawi
was one such scholar whose writings have survived.

Translations
of Arabic texts were needed firstly to gain practical and secular
knowledge and secondly to identify texts that could be used as teaching
material to enable people to gain professional qualifications. In
regard to professional degrees, medical texts and texts elucidating the
principles of astrology were particularly in demand, these being the
most highly paid professions at the time. Bear in mind that astrology
was a respectable profession then and all doctors of medicine were
required to study it, as they needed to understand the impact of lunar
cycles on human physiology. And as Burnett points out, under the
principles of Aristotle's physics, astrology was considered a science.
The scientists of today caustically dismiss astrology as mumbo jumbo
that should not be dignified with the appellation of science yet the
practice of astrology undoubtedly required complex mathematical skills
and the ability to do astronomical calculations in order to map out
astrological charts and determine horoscopes. Hence although frowned
upon by both the Ulema and by the Christian church, it was kept alive
at popular folk level in Islamic cultures of the middle ages as was
magic and divination. However as Burnett points out magic and
divination which gave access to secret knowledge through prayers or
other kinds of spiritual intervention, were strictly not regarded as
science and were never taught at universities. They were also frowned
upon by both Muslim and Christian authorities but again were very
popular in both cultures because they were seen as being enormously
effective. Thus European scholars eagerly sought to learn the secrets
of these practices from Arabs.

The Arabic medical texts that
were translated included works on women's diseases. Burnett relates how
in the Western tradition all texts relating to women's diseases were
attributed to a mythical doctor called Trotulla. These had become
incorporated into the Arabic treatises on women diseases and now made
their way back into Europe via the Latin translators. Another
specialism was the use Arab physicians made of music for recuperation
and healing - known as spiritual medicine and described in detail by
Arab doctors such as al-Razi. As Burnett points out though the West had
a strong musical culture the idea of music as therapy was new. It was
essentially a way of treating mental illness, which the Arabs regarded
as physiological and caused by disturbance of the humours and not by
evil spirits. The harmony of the humours was restored by playing
particular musical instruments and by singing in hospitals wards. Texts
on various kinds of vetinary medicine were also sought out such as
horse doctors - an important area since fit horses were vital to any
army, professional falconers who were trained to know how to look after
birds and cure them of various diseases, dog doctors and so on. Each
specialism of medicine human or animal had its own manual.

There
was also a tremendous dearth of reliable textbooks on practical and
vital subjects such as mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Some of
the texts translated were illustrated or even beautifully illuminated.
For instance the texts on astronomy contained very precise diagrams
that could be used as templates to make astrolabes. Where texts were
illustrated the illustrations and drawings were accurately copied where
the illustrations were deemed to provide information vital to the
subject of the text.

It is not difficult to see how even the
most basic of these Arabic manuscripts selected for translation were
seen as desperately needed by the Europe of the time. Consider Europe
after the decline of the Roman Empire. In the field of philosophy for
instance Greek giants such as Aristotle were but a distant memory of
Europe's classical past. Knowledge of mathematics on day to day and
scholarly levels was such that calculations were performed on the
fingers of the hand, using cumbersome Roman numerals. A glimpse of the
sorry state of arithmetic in Europe is given in the memoirs of the
medieval English scholar, Aldhelm of Malmsbury who lived in the late
7th century. He records his "near despair" in trying to "grasp the most
difficult of natural principles…what they call fractions". Even into
the late 10th century it was said that Northern Spain was the only
place in Christian Europe where mathematics was taught.

By the
time the Latin schools of translators had done their work the major
Arabic treatises became text books that "were central to the
bibliography" and you can see this, observes Burnett, if you look at
any list of text books of the middle ages. So looking at the book list
for the faculty of medicine almost every author was an Arabic author.
For philosophy the main text book was Aristotle but students learnt
their Aristotle through the commentaries of Ibn Sinna, al-Farabi and
al-Kindi. In astronomy the texts were from the Arabic. In geometry the
main text was Euclid's Elements but read in translation from the
Arabic. In arithmetic the Latin tradition was supplemented by the Arab
inspired sub-divisions of the subjects particularly in trigonometry and
algebra.

How did the translators gain access to specific Arabic
textbooks? As Burnett points out in Spain there were few ethnic Arabs.
Most of the scholars in Spain were probably Spanish Europeans who had
assimilated Islamic Arabic culture. But Arabic was the unifying
language of the whole of the Muslim world from Morocco to Afghanistan
and there is he says, considerable evidence of Arabic manuscripts being
trafficked frequently and speedily from one end of the Islamic dominion
to the other. Burnett refers to the work of the scholar Dimitri Gutas
who makes the point that when the Caliphs established their capital in
Baghdad in 750 they adopted a deliberate policy of translating every
thing from the cultures the Arabs had overwhelmed, into Arabic.
Translating the learned texts of the Greeks, the Persians, the Syrians
and the Indians gave the empire political and cultural unity and
reflected the belief that with knowledge lay power and the power of any
civilization lay in the written word, in its books. The library that
Haroon al-Rashid established in Baghdad was the largest library outside
China. Later in the 9th century when a separate caliphate was
established in Spain in al-Andalus under Abdul Rahman the 3rd a major
project of this Spanish Caliphate was to set up a large library in
Cordoba rivaling the library in Baghdad. And it became after Baghdad
the second largest library in the Muslim world.

The transmission
of vital knowledge through translations of Arabic texts was not the
only way new ways of doing things were conveyed from East to West.
Merchants of the middle ages also played their part and indeed
pioneered the introduction and use of advanced arithmetic which they
picked up from Arab traders in the bazaars of the Middle East and North
Africa. Traders and merchants are like ambassadors and are usually the
first to appreciate the practical advantages of how another culture
does things. Merchants were perhaps the first sector of the European
professional class to feel the impact of trade with the Arabic speaking
world and to appreciate the need for a less cumbersome way of
performing calculations other than using Roman numerals. They adopted
the Arab way of doing business and commerce, double entry book keeping
for instance and using the zero (sifar which later mutated into cipher
meaning code) long before such practices became accepted in the
population of Europe and began to be taught in European schools. One
merchant in particular, Leonardo Fibonacci or Leonard of Pisa became
the most famous of them all after authoring several books on the new
mathematics, which he had learnt in the course of his trading
connections and ventures with Arab merchants. He was so impressed with
Arab arithmetical practices and its application to commerce that he
took every opportunity to study it whenever he ventured on business
trips to the Middle East or Sicily. In 1202 he published Liber Abbaci,
the work that he is best known for and in which he put down all he had
learnt of the Arab way of doing business. This very influential book
revolutionized the way Europe looked at arithmetic. It was, says
Burnett, the most detailed and the most advanced book on arithmetic to
be published in the Europe of the time and remained so for two
centuries. In Liber Abbaci, for the first time European readers had a
mathematical text book that explained how to use the Arabic numerals
from 0 to 9, the decimal point and how these arithmetical 'innovations'
could be applied to business and commerce. For the first time a
European text book on arithmetic demonstrated the use of the plus sign
(+) for addition, the minus sign (-) for subtraction, the
multiplication sign (x) and division. Prior to Fibonacci's book these
signs were unknown in Europe. The major European trading cities of
Genoa, Venice and Florence soon began to put into practice the methods
Fibonacci had adopted from his Arab tutors. This became an imperative
as business became more complex and international and new ways were
needed to keep a trail of transactions involving a chain of people. It
was no longer practical to make payments in gold or silver and so the
bill of exchange came into use. This was the fore-runner of the modern
cheque from the Arabic sakk and it represented the holder's
creditworthiness. It is no surprise then that the merchants who were
prepared to honour these bills of exchange were the fore-runners of the
great banking dynasties of Europe.

Thus as Burnett's work
suggests Europe had a very close interaction with Arab and Islamic
cultures and through the conduit of Arab and Islamic cultures, a direct
line of communication to other great civilizations such as the Indian
and the Chinese. Further these links and the resultant intermingling
and cross fertilisation helped to shape the direction of the
renaissance and the birth of capitalism as we know it today. He
believes that a more accurate reflection of reality would be to see the
renaissance as not one but several renaissances. There was what Charles
Haskins called the 12th century renaissance that was triggered by the
recovery of ancient learning and the discovery of Arabic learning. This
was very much a scientific renaissance. In the late 15th century began
the Italian renaissance which was more a rediscovery of ancient art,
architecture, sculpture and literature. Finally at the beginning of the
17th century there began a change in scientific concepts with Galileo
and Copernicus and by the mid-16th century we see the beginning of the
new renaissance of science. And although transmission of Arab
influences had begun to wane by the late 14th century nevertheless it
has now been "quite convincingly shown" that even Copernicus's
heliocentric system which placed the sun and not the earth at the
centre of our universe, was in truth inspired by an Arabic text brought
to Italy by Greek scholars who fled Constantinople when it fell to the
Turks in 1453. The text in question was authored by Nasir ad-Din
al-Tusi, a leading astronomer who like Theodore of Antioch also studied
under Kamal al-Din Ibn Yunus and who designed and supervised the
construction of the Maragha observatory in Persia in the 13th century.
Tusi's 'Memoir on astronomy' (Tadhkira fi ilm al'haya) amended
Ptolemy's work on the motion of spheres and led him to formulate the
theorem known as the Tusi couple which states that linear motion can be
derived from uniform circular motion. Tusi's manuscript contains a
series of diagrams that demonstrate this, showing clearly one sphere
rolling inside another of twice the radius. It has now been
acknowledged that in his 'Revolutions' Copernicus reproduced the Tusi
couple. Tusi's original experiment as reported in his Arabic manuscript
was vital in enabling Copernicus to arrive at his heliocentric view of
our solar system. Copernicus remained silent about his Arabic sources
and it probably did not occur to his contemporaries to track the source
of his inspiration to its Islamic origins. Burnett speculates that this
may have been the beginning of the rot that set in and the gulf that
has become ever wider as Europeans became increasingly unwilling to
admit that they may have been indebted to Islamic and other cultures
for ideas that caused them to look at the world in a different way.

How
different from the 12th century when as Burnett emphasizes, European
scholars were inclined to boast and proudly advertise the fact that
they acquired their learning from Arabs and how Arab knowledge in the
field of astronomy or medicine for instance was far superior to any
that could be found in the most superior Latin institutions. In the
13th century Leonardo Fibonacci the Italian merchant turned author of
European's most influential book on mathematics writes with pride of
his early training in Algeria on the Arab way of doing arithmetic, at
the behest of his father. In his preface to Liber Abbaci he pays
unabashed tribute to Hindu, Arabic and Greek mathematical know how and
how he came to learn enough to be able to write his book, through his
close and friendly connections with Arab /Islamic scholars and traders.

I
joined my father after his assignment by his homeland Pisa as an
officer in the custom house located in Bugia (Algeria) for the Pisan
merchants who thronged to it. He had me marvelously instructed in the
Hindu-Arabic numerals and calculation. I enjoyed so much the
instruction that I later continued to study mathematics while on
business trips to Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily and Provence and there
enjoyed discussions and disputations with the scholars of those places.
Returning to Pisa I composed this book of fifteen chapters which
comprises what I feel is the best of the Hindu, Arabic and Greek
methods.

Another very visually striking example of this mindset
which acknowledged that Europe rediscovered it's own past through it's
ties with Arab and Islamic cultures can be seen in the pages of a
deluxe edition of another book that was printed in Venice in 1484. The
book is Aristotle's Works. The Latin text incorporates Aristotle's
philosophical works as well as commentaries to his works by leading
Arab philosophers. Both the Works and the commentaries were sourced
from Arabic translations by Gerard of Cremona, a prolific 12th century
translator who worked in the translation schools of Toledo. This very
lavishly illuminated book had each page of text framed with lush
painted scenes. At the top of the page is painted Aristotle sitting on
a rock debating with a turbaned scholar. This turbaned scholar is none
other than Avarroes or Ibn Rushd. European scholars of the time
regarded the Muslim Avarroes as the translator and interpreter of
Aristotle par excellence. They referred to him as "the mind of
Aristotle incarnate" and no one in Europe at the time felt his equal.
What better acknowledgement of the close contacts and indeed as Charles
Burnett emphasizes, friendly contacts between Europe and the Islamic
world during the so-called "dark ages".

A full list of publications by Professor Charles Burnett is available at: